Day 10 - Tartt and Flynn - Some background, and their inspirations

Ah, I am done with All the Missing Girls now! The ending was unexpected. I
can’t really say anything else about it here without spoiling the book, so
that’s about everything that I can say of the book now. READ IT! The mystery is
too good, and understanding the whole thing is satisfying!

Yesterday, I did some research about two authors that I have absolutely fallen
in love with after reading their first novel: Donna Tartt and Gillian Flynn. I
saw their interviews, read about what they had to say about their respective
books (Secret History and Gone Girl). I found this amazing
elle.com
article which is an interview with Flynn about her book, and this article is so
tastefully written. Nothing like the normal drab style in which most interviews
are written (Most of them are just Q and A type, with Q: … A: … without any
comments from the author at all, which make them feel like the transcript to a
video and hardly qualify as an article)

Donna Tartt worked for almost 8 years on Secret History, and that book was so
good. It was about 600 pages long (or longer) and her other two books are
actually longer. Goldfinch being about 770 pages long. I would love to read
these two and complete my Tartt experience, but frankly, it’s too big of a
commitment for now, and I can’t really make it. (Surprisingly, Tana French, who
writes books that have an eerie similarity to Tartt’s books, also writes books
that are large ~ about 400-430 pages.)

Tartt also said that she loved poetry and wanted to be a poet in a 1992
interview of her. She also mentioned Dickens as someone who’s writing influenced
her!

Flynn’s background though is a bit more interesting. She worked for almost 10
years in Entertainment Weekly, writing God knows what (I couldn’t find her
articles with a cursory search, could dig more for sure), she then started
working on Sharp Objects.

At EW she could be up to her eyeballs in kiss kiss bang bang, but kiss kiss
bang bang at a remove, safely confined to the screen, dissipating once the
credits rolled and the lights came up. She stayed on staff for 10 years, writing
about movies and TV.

And she was inspired to do so by Dennis Lehane’s Mystic
River. Yup, that is
certainly on my reading list now! While Sharp Objects was a fine book, it had a
good character list, the revelation at the end is ominous and I felt like it had
been looming over everyone for almost the whole book now, with how creepy that
particular character is, Dark Places was the REAL DEAL! In some ways, the
dysfunctional female lead in Dark Places was even more shocking and full of
promise compared to Amy Dunne, the psychopath from heaven. (That phrase should
mean something special).

I am looking for the next book to read. I am going to go search for that now!
That’s it.